The Sackler Family

Purdue Frederick Company (a Purdue Pharma subsidiary) pled guilty to misbranding OxyContin with intent to defraud and mislead. Sales reps had been instructed to tell physicians OxyContin had a lower potential for abuse than other opioids — a claim the company knew to be false.

• —Three Purdue executives also pled guilty to misdemeanor misbranding: chief medical officer, chief legal officer, and head of compliance.
• —Criminal fine and civil settlements totaled $600 million.
• —None of the executives served prison time.
• —Sackler family members on the board of directors were not charged.

Source:DOJ press release, May 10, 2007

Documents released through the Massachusetts attorney general's lawsuit against Purdue Pharma show Sackler family board members received regular reports on suspicious prescribers ("pill mills"), were aware of OxyContin abuse rates, and approved continued aggressive sales strategies regardless.

• —Richard Sackler, as Purdue president, received internal reports on overdose deaths and high-volume prescribers flagged as likely pill mills.
• —Internal document "Project Tango" (2014): Purdue explored entering the addiction treatment market — proposing to profit from treating the addiction their drug created.
• —Emails from Richard Sackler celebrating OxyContin's launch as a "blizzard of prescriptions."
• —Board minutes show approval of sales quotas at known high-risk prescribers.
• —The Sackler family withdrew approximately $10.7 billion from Purdue between 2008 and 2017, per the bankruptcy court record — as lawsuits mounted.

Source:Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Purdue Pharma, amended complaint, 2019

In October 2020, Purdue Pharma pled guilty to three federal felonies: conspiracy to defraud the United States, violating federal anti-kickback statutes by paying physicians kickbacks disguised as "speaker fees," and conspiracy to violate the Anti-Kickback Statute by directing sales reps to call on prescribers they knew were running pill mills.

• —Agreed penalties: $8.3 billion in criminal fines, forfeiture, and civil payments.
• —Due to Purdue's bankruptcy filing, actual victim recovery was substantially less than the headline figure.
• —No member of the Sackler family was charged criminally in connection with the 2020 plea.
• —DOJ called the resolution the "largest criminal and civil settlement for a company in the opioid industry."

Source:DOJ press release, October 21, 2020

The Sackler family's bankruptcy settlement included broad nonconsensual immunity from civil suits for family members — even though no Sackler ever filed for personal bankruptcy. The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P. that the bankruptcy code does not authorize this. The settlement was sent back for renegotiation.

• —The original settlement would have shielded Sackler family members from all future civil liability in exchange for ~$4.5B in family contributions.
• —More than 100,000 opioid victims and their families had sued or had claims against Sackler family members personally.
• —Supreme Court ruled: June 27, 2024. 5-4 decision.
• —Renegotiated settlement reached in 2025; Sacklers agreed to pay approximately $6 billion total.
• —Opinion of the Court (Gorsuch, J.): "The Bankruptcy Code gives a court the power to discharge the debts of a debtor. It does not give a court the power to extinguish the rights of third parties who have claims against non-debtors."

Source:Harrington v. Purdue Pharma L.P., 603 U.S. ___ (2024)

The CDC estimates approximately 500,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2019. Annual opioid deaths exceeded 80,000 by 2021. The overdose death curve begins its upward inflection concurrent with OxyContin's 1996 market launch and Purdue's decade of aggressive marketing.

• —OxyContin launched 1996. Purdue's sales force grew from 318 to 671 reps in the following years.
• —Purdue's marketing claimed OxyContin's extended-release formula had less than 1% addiction risk — a figure fabricated from a single paragraph in a 1980 letter in the New England Journal of Medicine.
• —By 2001, OxyContin had become the best-selling opioid in the US, generating $1.5B annually.
• —Public health researchers at Stanford, Harvard, and the NBER have published peer-reviewed studies attributing a substantial share of the opioid epidemic's first wave to pharmaceutical marketing, with Purdue at the center.
• —No member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged. This is not an exoneration — it is a prosecutorial decision.

Source:CDC NCHS Drug Overdose Surveillance Data

Despite two federal guilty pleas by Purdue Pharma, internal documents showing Sackler board members were aware of abuse and death rates, and $10.7B in asset extraction before bankruptcy, no member of the Sackler family has ever been criminally charged. The Senate Finance Committee documented this accountability gap in a 2022 investigation.

• —Senate Finance Committee report (May 2022) found DOJ failed to pursue criminal accountability for executives and owners.
• —DOJ's 2020 resolution was structured to resolve Purdue's corporate criminal liability without extending to individual Sackler family members.
• —Attorneys general in Massachusetts, New York, and other states pushed for criminal referrals; DOJ did not act.
• —The Sackler family name has been removed from museums, universities, and galleries worldwide as institutions returned donations — including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, and the Guggenheim.

Source:Senate Finance Committee report on Purdue Pharma, May 2022